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How God Works

Full Product Description

Does God exist? Using an intellectually rigorous, scientific approach, Marshall Brain--the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and author of the How Stuff Works series--sets out to resolve the eternal debate once and for all. With a compelling sense of curiosity, he breaks down mankind's search for a higher power, tackling such quandaries as: Who is God? What are his attributes? What is God doing and why? How does God interact with humanity? And ultimately, how can humans know with certainty whether God is real or imaginary?How God Works is an enlightening journey in critical thinking that challenges readers to boldly approach the subject of personal faith and put aside intuition in favor of objectivity and logic.

How God Works by Marshall Brain was published by Sterling Publishing Co Inc in March 2015 and is our 53340th best seller. The ISBN for How God Works is 9781454910619.

Reviews of How God Works

Critical thinking about critical thinking

Reviewed by Gerhard Nebe-Von-Caron

Forget about studying the bible yourself if you can see it through the eyes of an atheist instead. Starting off with the question with the perceived absence of God in Banda Aceh, the Authors questioning why God allowes humans to die in a disaster. By doing so he shows lack of critical thinking due to his materialist views right from the beginning implying that God should not allow physical death when it happens in larger numbers. Thus by failing to critically think about the presuppositions of the questions of the self-perceived critical thinker the reader gets set up on a journey together with the author in failing critical thinking right from the start. The logical fallacies of his following arguments are too numerous to list.

The author’s claim for God not to exist, based on his failure to answer prayers, is legendary in his web presence under "God is imaginary" on youtube or howgod works.com. You can use the internet as alternative resource to the book to demonstrate his logical fallacies and save the money. However, it is harder to scribble your notes on the youtube webpages than on the pages in the book, as your comments on the web will either vanish by new comments replacing yours or by being deleted or hidden from public view (ghosted).

Unfortunately, many Christians, including most Churches, portray prayer as a way of asking God to fulfil our wishes or our way to remind God how to do things better (e.g. to give wisdom to those in power – as if he would need reminding) or to do things on our behalf. The even teach that to say "and this I ask in the name of Jesus" is to add a first class stamp to your prayer request to God instead of teaching that to pray in his name means to pray like he would have prayed. The most irrational prayer is to ask God to heal person A, B or C – implying to fix their material body. If God were to answer those prayers for some but not for others God would be a very unfair concept. But then a lot of people believe in such a God because this image complies with the God they created out of their own wishful thinking. To demonstrate that “my will be done” even when adding “if is suits you” is wishful thinking, not a logically coherent understanding of prayer.

A key failure of critical thinking is to conclude that because we can imagine that God exists but not proof his existence would imply that therefore God is not real. It feels a bit like history repeating itself. The term imaginary combined with the term number was originally coined in the 17th century as a derogatory term and regarded as fictitious or useless. However, upon thinking about the concept it gained wide acceptance following the work of Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss and we now perceive 0 as a real and an imaginary number. The concept of proof is one that is lost on scientists that believe their experiments to be proof for their theory. The only proof of a theory is a negative one, e.g. that experiment that proves something wrong. The fact that we can imagine God but not prove him is the essential element of faith: “to trust in something to be true in the absence of proof”. It is the human capacity that allows us to build scientific theories and allows us to express love. Pity on the likes of Marshall Brain who can only believe in a loving God if he would give them material gifts upon their request as that is the proof they require for his love for them. And the more miraculous/irrational the wish, only if they have “proof” for such miracle they would belief in his existence. Strange that some ”critical thinkers” require irrational actions of God in order to believe in their irrational God picture. It is reassuring to know that critical thinkers gain knowledge from proof, not beliefs, and they have no desire to imagine a God that is irrational.

To discuss this book in confirmation classes is a great way to build a logally coherent view of God and prayer and to gain the intellectual backbone to rationally defend your faith